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Design as Everyday Theatre Foverskov, Maria
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2020
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Foverskov, M. (2020). Design as Everyday Theatre: Towards a performative praxis of social design. Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademis Skoler for Arkitektur, Design og Konservering.
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Design as
Everyday Theatre
Towards a performative praxis of social design
Maria Foverskov PhD Dissertation
Supervisor
Thomas Binder, Professor
Funded by the Danish Enterprise and Construction Authority (EBST) under the program for user-driven innovation, Danish Centre for Design Research (DCDR) &
KADK.
_______________________________
© Maria Foverskov
Illustrations and photos: Maria Foverskov (if not stated differently) Layout: Maria Foverskov, Henrik Hetz
Proofreading: Helle Raheem Typeface: Din 2014 / Garamond
Published in Denmark in 2019 by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation (KADK)
_______________________________
Design as
Everyday Theatre
Towards a performative praxis of social design
Maria Foverskov
To the women in my past, present and future my grandmothers, my mother, my daughter
“Theatre is action! (…), it is a rehearsal of revolution!” (Augusto Boal 1979)
“The dialectics of tradition and transcendence - that is what design is about” (Pelle Ehn 1988)
“Acting in the face of uncertainty” (Jamer Hunt 2012)
Table of content:
Abstract: ... x
1. Introduction: Design in transition towards the Social ... 12
1.1 From industrial production and beyond – Where is design heading? ... 13
1.2 How do social design practices at design educations engage publics? ... 21
1.2.1 Swamp-diving between Malmö and Copenhagen ... 21
1.2.2 Touring through Chicago, Seattle and New York ... 22
1.2.3 Rambling through the Salone Satellites at the fringes of Milano ... 27
1.2.4 Social Design; from Transformation Design to Transition Design? ... 31
1.3 Empirical foundation and related peers: From sustainability to well-being ... 34
1.3.1 Design Anthropological Innovation Model (DAIM) 2008-2010 ... 35
1.3.2 Senior Interaction (SI) 2009-2012 ... 41
1.3.3 Give&Take (G&T) 2014-2017 ... 47
1.3.4 Accountability and trails between the research projects and the thesis program ... 49
1.4 Program: Towards methodologies of Everyday Theatres ... 54
1.4.1 Research focus; drama, performance and intervention ... 56
1.5 Reading guide and thesis structure ... 59
2. Theoretical Foundation: Homo Performans & Performance ... 63
2.1 Social dramas ... 64
2.1.1 Drama and the performative turn ... 64
2.1.2 Victor Turner between Burke, Goffman and Geertz ... 65
2.2 Extra-daily theatre ... 81
2.2.1 Richard Schechner between Turner, Brecht and Grotowski ... 83
2.2.2 Erika Fischer-Lichte and the autopoietic feedback loop ... 109
2.3 Coda: A caravan in-between drama & theatre ... 122
2.3.1 Dwight Conquergood; Performance Studies on the move ... 123
3. A Performative Methodology: Constructive Design Research ... 128
3.1 Constructive Design Research ... 131
3.1.1 The Lab, Field and Showroom within constructive design research ... 135
3.1.2 Programmatic approach; Program-experiment dialectics ... 137
3.2 Methodological program-experiment dialectics within SI ... 141
3.2.1 Concept Phase; mobilizing partners through experimenting field-visits ... 142
3.2.2 Design Lab; rehearsing through workshops ... 145
Prologue
3.2.4 Drifts of partner roles caused by an experimental collaboration set-up ... 153
3.3 Performative worldmaking through globe, sphere and dome views ... 158
3.3.1 Multiple worldviews; world versions in-between globes and spheres ... 160
3.3.2 Correspondence of lifeworlds as ’growing older together’ ... 166
3.3.3 From dialectic to dialogical design roles – caused by multiple ways of knowing ... 168
4. Rehearsing ... 178
4.1 Experiencing Tage Larsen evoking the life of props ... 179
4.1.1 Introduction to Rehearsing ... 182
4.1.2 Turner’s and Schechner’s dramatic rehearsals ... 184
4.2 Reflexive devices; probing, staging and re-framing ... 191
4.2.1 Rehearsing as probing with props and probes ... 192
4.2.2 Staging an in-between tradition and transcendence ... 196
4.2.3 (Re-)framing design as everyday theatre ... 199
4.3 Probing rehearse-ability of communities and social media ... 204
4.3.1 Leaflet & Leisure club; Municipal dramas of ‘growing older together’ ... 205
4.3.2 Leaving mourning nightgowns & resisting dancing; senior commons ... 210
4.3.3 Designing the Super Dots for Ketty; Trickstering worldviews ... 213
4.4 Ketty goes shopping ... 220
4.4.1 Ketty probes: Shall we go shopping, Lilly? ... 220
4.4.2 Probing a space for rehearsal; between as if and is ... 223
4.5 A yellow community; from Robert’s sailboat club to a trip to the park ... 226
4.5.1 Staging a yellow community: Could we be Bendt and Kirsten? ... 227
4.5.2 What if… we join your trip to the park? May ‘the blue’ partake? ... 231
4.5.3 Robert’s landscape evokes a ‘third space’ of a future what-if ... 234
4.6 Amy’s morning call; re-framed ... 236
4.6.1 I could use the screen to record the morning message? ... 236
4.6.2 From ‘Bendt and Kirsten’ and ‘the Blue’ to Amy´s morning call ... 237
4.7 Making tangible props for gathering social dramas ... 239
4.8 Rehearsing by probing, staging and undergoing re-framing ... 243
5. Performing ... 251
5.1 Experiencing myself spectating the Abramović Method ... 252
5.1.1 Beyond Rehearsing towards Performing ... 259
5.1.2 From workshops to a Living Lab ... 260
5.2 Living Labs and the Living Lab of Valbyparken ... 262
PrologueAct IAct II
5.2.1 From design as everyday theatre to design as extra-daily theatre ... 264
5.2.2 Mobilizing for extra-daily theatre ... 266
5.2.3 A mise-en-scène of gathering, performing and dispersing ... 268
5.3 Playing along; that day we all played croquet ... 270
5.3.1 Gathering the audience’s attention: Okay let’s begin ... 271
5.3.2 At the water pond: Look there are still roses in November! ... 272
5.3.3 The performance event of ‘That day we all played croquet’ ... 274
5.3.4 Unfolding the autopoietic feedback loop of the croquet play ... 275
5.3.5 Looping between croquet players and far-seated or departing audiences ... 277
5.3.6 Tuning into stumbling bodies, laughter and falling leaves ... 279
5.3.7 Off-season pond emerges as enchanted lively senior playground ... 280
5.3.8 A triad of looping, tuning and consuming enchantment ... 282
5.4 Jaws of death; when Bo is present at Safari Frisbee ... 284
5.4.1 Present at the playground: Who came up with the idea of Safari Frisbee? ... 285
5.4.2 At the tree stub, just before the “jaws of death” ... 286
5.4.3 Performing the Schechnerian ‘logic of its own’ of Safari Frisbee ... 289
5.4.4 Performing Presence - When Bo came down from the tree ... 291
5.4.5 The multiple and relational characters of Bo as ‘perceptual multistable’ ... 294
5.4.6 Embodiment as a human condition: tuning for the extra-daily everyday ... 299
5.5 Not like us; how Børge joins the silent celebration ... 302
5.5.1 Strolling towards the tribune: Nobody should come here and vacuum ... 303
5.5.2 At the Staircase Tribune: This is not like us, at all ... 305
5.5.3 Enchanting moments: from ‘we’ becoming an ‘us’ ... 308
5.5.4 Unfolding facets of enchantment ... 309
5.5.5 Enchantment: We becoming us – about vacuuming and doughnuts ... 312
5.5.6 Børge’s living present, hinged on past experience and future expectation ... 314
5.5.7 The silent communitas of “this is not like us” ... 316
5.6 Sustaining a mise-en-scène of the present extra-daily theatre ... 317
5.7 Performing by looping, tuning and consuming enchantment ... 320
6. Reenacting ... 327
6.1 Re-membering, actualizing and recollecting moments of completion ... 329
6.1.1 Introduction to aftermath and reenactment ... 336
6.1.2 Introduction to closure and completion ... 339
6.2 Context to the reenactment workshop ... 343
6.2.1 Designing dispersion; how to leave ‘the living’ by keeping life going? ... 343
6.2.2 Reenacting stories and practices from the park around the Sphere ... 345
Act IIAct III
6.3.1 Now it’s a perfectly ordinary Friday morning in the park ... 349
6.3.1.1 Between mise-en-scène and restored performance as a reactualization ... 350
6.3.2 What we normally do… ... 353
6.3.2.1 Restoring individual pasts into a collective ‘framed’ reenactment ... 356
6.3.3 Poul Erik reenacting the apple pose ... 359
6.3.3.1 “Re-membering” others in the cultural fabric of a story ... 362
6.3.4 Re-actualizing an ordinary Friday: this is not-not an ordinary Friday ... 364
6.4 Red flag; This is not for all – You need to take part ... 366
6.4.1 You are supposed to actually do something! ... 368
6.4.2 Battling the performance-to-be: younger seniors as future citizens ... 370
6.4.3 Reenacting the past as ‘breaking and remaking’ ... 373
6.4.4 Interventionistic civic struggles emerge from the Red Flag ... 375
6.5 Great moments; Before dispersing ... 377
6.5.1 I appreciate that somebody collects the great moments ... 378
6.5.1.1 Collecting great moments as aftereffects of Jackson’s windows ... 381
6.5.1.2 Dispersing as “becoming something else” as re-enchanted ... 384
6.6 Dispersing an actual as a moment of completion ... 386
6.7 Reenacting by re-membering, actualizing and witnessing recollecting ... 394
7. Discussion: Navigating the Worlds of Everyday Theatre Towards a Performative Praxis of Social Design ... 399
7.1 Navigating Serra’s artworks and notions of form-giving and form ... 401
7.2 Returning to worldmaking when discussing orientations of navigation ... 407
7.3 Considerations of navigating collective design praxis ... 410
7.3.1 Approaching Everyday Theatres; as worldmaking with multiple worldviews ... 412
7.3.2 Positions within Everyday Theatres; from somewhere ... 416
7.3.3 Practices of Everyday Theatre; as becoming a/part ... 421
7.4 Navigating a design praxis of performative social design ... 424
8. Conclusion: Resuming Drama, Performance & Intervention ... 438
8.1 Co-design as drama ... 439
8.2 Co-design is performance ... 443
8.3 Co-design intervention ... 448
8.4 Perspectives ... 452
References ... 454
Act IIIEpilogue
Abstract
We live in transitional times, moving from designing objects to designing transitions and transformations of (service) relations and experiences. Designers have now moved beyond designing for industrial production, to further engage in co-production of partnerships, entailing the complex relations of public spaces and civic spheres; Co-designing with citizens as well as public and private partners. Within civic design of welfare technology there is no longer a user nor a consumer. No singular use-context and not one common temporal consumption of ‘use’.
Relations of design and use – production and consumption – are constantly distributed in feedback loops – transgressing a linear flow of time, space and social relations. Contemporary design research no longer discusses how to ‘design for the real world’, but rather ‘designs for the pluriverse’ where everybody designs. In short: designers are not only designing with, but also within fluid partnerships for societal change. Design literature doesn’t provide much scaffolding for professional designers navigating such unstable social and temporal landscapes. This thesis provides a performative framework and introduce a performance praxis, when navigating entangled design roles and complex modes of participation. The thesis describes transitions of contemporary design roles and practices, engaged in co-design of public and civic concerns, as social design within public-private partnerships of welfare innovation. The thesis is the result of a longer participatory action research study, investigating how co-design is changing towards ‘social means’, offering empirical insights into performative, relational and transitional design practices.
The empirical explorations of the multiple and situated roles of design is anchored in three user-driven innovation projects of citizens centred welfare services and public-private partnerships, related to different aspects of the Danish contexts of welfare innovation. Exploring citizens wellbeing, across different sectors as related to social welfare technology and informal care communities within slightly supported senior commons. The research is situated within the fields of Co-Design and Participatory Design, but this thesis introduces theoretical lenses from Performance Studies. Performance ranging from anthropological concepts of liminoid
experiences and social dramas, to enchantment of extra-daily theatrical processes, for articulating the embodied and performative design aspects and social materiality of co-design. By
ethnographic descriptions of situated co-design encounters, the thesis propose to view three performative modes of participation, described as Rehearsing, Performing and Reenacting. Within these performative modes both citizens, civil servants, private- and NGO partners are engaging as everyday designers, co-designing and transitioning public-private relations of welfare and wellbeing within communities of practice. Everyday designers are invited to gather for co- constructing a liminoid and reflexive space for Rehearsing; as trying out and playing with existing and altered practices. And further engage a mode of Performing; that sustain situated relations, as living the embodied practices in a present and specific context. The third mode of engagement is
existing (as well as possible and undesirable) relations, by de-and re-constructing habits and practices among partners co-design within the Everyday Theatre. Such Reenacting's initiate an adjusted direction for future sequences of Rehearsing, Performing and Reenacting Everyday Theatres.
Design as Everyday Theatre, describe performative design modes and approaches to trickster, wayfarer and barter for gathering, sustaining and dispersing engagement and
participation within different worldviews for transitioning social practices in relation to others.
The relational design modes are further discussed through a navigational approach, position and practice, thus directing the constructive, deconstructive as well as reconstructive worldmaking praxis and might lead to smaller transformations of welfare relations and professional- and civic practices.
The research approach is methodologically anchored within a pragmatic tradition of Constructive Design Research and Participatory Action Research. A programmatic approach is applied for framing the dialectic relations within programs and experiments. Constructive Design Research practices deriving from the traditions of the Lab, Field and Gallery are further introduced as pointing to a dialogical and bricolaged modality of weaving different transdisciplinary ‘ways of knowing’. Attending the practices from the Labs: as deconstructing theoretical concepts; with Field practices of contextualizing thick descriptions; with the Gallery-practices of exhibiting such re-constructions in sketching possible future directions.
The thesis contributes to the field of co-design by analysing collective and collaborative encounters in relation to the performative qualities of design – as Everyday Theatre. The thesis tentatively provides a socio-spatio-temporal rendering as a performative atlas for navigating worlds and practices in the making. Thus, positioning design praxis as entangled, embodied and performative; always in fluctuating relations to oneself as well as Others – Among a present performative I and multiple other social relations of we, us and them. Between present positions situated here and other spatial positions; as there. During this present now as well as other temporalities of then. The thesis reflects how designers could approach their bodies as tools for appropriating transitions and adopting social change to explore the roles of trickstering, wayfaring and bartering co-production of transformation.
1. Introduction:
Design in transition towards the Social
This chapter presents an introduction to a field of design in transition
towards the social and the public, and forms the empirical and
programmatic foundation of the
thesis Design as Everyday Theatre.
I will set the stage by asking a rather open question: Where is design heading? I don’t intend to provide a simple answer, but I will provide intertwining kaleidoscopic snippets of stories of designing for industrial production, joined with four voices from the last three decades who also questioned where design has been heading. I will present this as an introduction to describing a transition from an industrial design tradition towards a performative and social design practice, transitioning beyond post-industrial design, towards co-designing within the social, public and civic spheres.
1.1 From industrial production and beyond – Where is design heading?
The present thesis is my probe inviting you to embark on a journey with me and enter into the realms of some of the co-design performances that I have encountered during my PhD. But this thesis is also a prop that supports me in staging stories – stories where I invite other voices to be part of describing design encounters of how we have been performing co-design. The journey sets out from an interest in design as industrial form but evolves into an engagement with design for social transformation and sustainable services as a means for societal change. Industrial, Ceramic and Conceptual Design, which I have previously been taught practicing, never originated from bookshelves but from encounters with skilled people, tools and materials in workshops. But since this is (also) an academic design contribution, I choose to highlight some first steps of the journey originating from my bookshelf. The four authors’ contributions, spanning references from the last 30 years, as well as my past situated design encounters will support my story of how design is in transition beyond industrial production and is headed towards a more social, public and collaborate praxis.
When I first strived to become an apprentice of design, I wrote a motivation in my application for the then Danish Design School. Here I described my desire to contribute to the design of everyday objects. My ambition was to improve and design everyday objects that people don’t really see or notice, even though they are an integral part of everyday life, just like the cutlery that brings pleasurable experiences of food closer to the senses, even if it is not noticed as
‘good design’ in the social context of a dining situation. Back then I was striving to bring the magic into the everyday by designing products for everybody to use and enjoy, without much explicit awareness regarding the use of design products. To pursue this ambition, I attended a design academy in Florence, Italy to improve my design skills wanting to learn the practices of
‘good design’.
The design journey took off in Florence, where I learned the skills of freehand rendering and technical drawing of industrial design. Much later, when I read Andrea Branzi’s book Learning from Milan introducing a Second Modernity (1988), I also learned how industrial design had already
then entered the afternoon of industrial production. From my parents’ colourful Bo Bedre interior magazines I had skimmed through in the 1980s and 1990s, I now realised that the post-Memphis products and industrial design tradition had changed a lot. Branzi’s manifesto of a post-industrial design, published in 1988, pointed to a second modernity of design, as a post-postmodernism or new modernity that since the 1960s’ mass market and post-modernity had disintegrated into separate niches and was becoming reformed into new and multi-coloured majorities – a movement away from objects that set out to please everyone, towards objects that picked their own consumers; from the languages of reason to those of emotion; from the certainties of science to the perversities of fashion; from the object to the effect (Branzi 1988: 11).
Branzi suggested that designers of the second modernity should offer alternatives rather than try to alter reality directly. He also argued that designers should design from the local perspective and that design should not strive for universality: “Design project today is no longer an act intended to alter reality, pushing it in the direction of order and logic. Instead the project is an act of invention that creates something to be added on to existing reality, increasing its depth and multiplying the number of choices available” (Branzi 1988: 17).
Returning from Italy I realized that designing washing machines and soap dispensers was not the kind of design I wanted to pursue. I enrolled at the Danish Design School within the Industrial Design program1 and after some years it was time to make another journey. This time, in 2006, in the heydays after Droog, I went to the Dutch design capital, Eindhoven. At Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE) I enrolled in the program of Man and Well-being. In the local bookshop I bought a paperback written by John Thackara titled: In the Bubble – Designing in a Complex World. Initially I probably bought it because of its compelling tactility, with its white cover and its subtle-toned smooth recycled paper. But like most design students (back then), I was too busy crafting and exploring tactility and materiality and encountering the many new workshops, to get to the point where I could set aside time to actually read.2
However, I did skim through the book on my journey between the Ceramic Research classes in Den Bosch on Wednesdays and the more human-centred interaction classes on Thursdays back in Eindhoven. As I went back and forth between my ceramic samples showing the difference of bas-relief, structure or texture, and interaction classes that dealt with intervening in public life at Stadhuisplein (the city hall square) a few keywords caught my eye. In Thackara's book: In the Bubble, I read that design was more about process than product and more about
1 I enrolled planning to study under the transdisciplinary program: ‘Tanken, Materialet, Rummet’ (TMR), roughly translating into
‘Mind, Matter, Context’. But this program closed down before I had finished my first year of BA and was able to apply.
2 Besides the obligatory readings such as Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ and Mau’s call for ‘Massive Change’ for the utopia/dystopia-scented philosophy classes.
systems and services than about surfaces and packages. I also picked up that cultural differences should be addressed as values not as obstacles. I marked a long quote in this book: “The case for conviviality is that if we were to take more responsibility for our own well-being, we might rely less on care as a service delivered to us by third parties – especially the state. Such a shift in emphasis – from delivered care to supported care – would enable governments to focus on the supporting infrastructures, collaboration tools, and social software for better connected
communities by enhancing dialogue, encounter, and community in our everyday lives” (Thackara 2006: 114).
Maybe I marked the quote because I was struggling to define who the “well-being” was for, or who the “Man” was, that we were designing for in the main program I followed of “Man and Well-being.” The conceptual design program at Design Academy Eindhoven was described as follows: “Things, environments, and experiences that are designed to enhance life and enable us to thrive. Whether you are looking at for example, cutlery, water, dance or design for the health care system, wellbeing is the starting point for your design approach. You design with a view to integrating the way things look with human experience; you look at projects from a physical and emotional perspective, practical and poetic, individual and social. One eye sees, the other feels.”3 Maybe I had enough of ‘well-being’ as conceptual concepts of design, or well-being so tightly curated, defined and controlled by our program teachers of master designers such as Ilse Crawford and Aldo Bakker, where ‘good design’ of human experience therefore leaving the department of Man and Well-being, at that time in 2006 ‘had to be’ and therefore was – as smooth, white and clean, as the cover of Thackara’s new book. Back then I would probably have benefited from reading Thackara a bit more thoroughly, and maybe I would have learned how Thackara questioned and grabbled with similar issues as me. Because his fundamental question:
“What is all this stuff for?” started to attract me.
Although Thackara were not questioning the specific DAE-style within Man and Well- being of beautiful and clean white vases, glass bowls and simplistic cutlery to seduce our senses, he was still questioning the massive production of products. Instead Thackara suggested designers design from the edge and learn from the world, that they stop designing for, but instead design with. He suggested a people-centred world: a world based less on stuff and more on people. The design focus should be on services – not things, as radical innovation already emerges in daily life.
Thackara’s view of design is understood to be more about process than product; more about systems and services than about surfaces and packages; more about work to do than things to
3 https://www.designacademy.nl/Study/Bachelor/DesignDepartments.aspx
buy. Following Branzi, Thackara further highlights the importance of the local and the embedded, when designing in our fluid, complex and hyper-connected world. (Thackara 2006)
I pursued a growing interest in designing for a people-centred world of ‘real people’
inspired by a conversation with my teacher, Tessa Blokland, from DAE. She remarked how unusual my portfolio was, because I had photographs of real people interacting with my
prototypes and concepts throughout the entire portfolio. Returning to finish my design education in Copenhagen in 2008, I started to research and prototype for a type of social design that could raise awareness and motivation of how to act and make changes according to social sustainability in the public sphere, since I noticed how this had been growing and changing on the pavements of Copenhagen for better or for worse. Since Copenhagen was soon to host the climate summit COP15, there seemed to be a potential for change in the attention of both citizens and designers.
While I struggled to design for social change with my MA project “Dear Copenhagen – a Spatial Story about Sustainability,” I also struggled with the academic traditions and boundaries. Since I had decided to graduate from the department of Industrial Design, I had to design a tangible product. I was told I could not graduate from a design school without a tangible design product.
So, after exploring and experimenting with prototyping concepts for most of my final project, in the end I did craft a proposal for an industrial product.
After graduation, did I become an industrial designer, a product designer or a designer of well-being? I simply called myself ‘a designer’, since I had spent more years in-between the departments of glass and ceramics experimenting with materials and processes, acquiring conceptual design competencies in Eindhoven and working as a design researcher in a strategic consultancy merging the social sciences with business development and design than I had developing my actual industrial design skills. But when I entered the field of design research, my colleagues were still quite keen on assigning me the title of Industrial Designer. Even though I had spent most of my design studies trying to find alternative positions for designing for (post) industrial form, I had not found a proper title.
A couple of years after entering the field of design research and co-design, I had positioned what co-workers called my ‘traditional design’ competencies, while also repositioning and acquiring new skills within the research landscape of social design and social innovation. I once again returned to Italy where Francesca Rizzo, Anna Meroni and their group of researchers at the Politecnico di Milano hosted me. Ezio Manzini used to lead the group but was formally on his way towards retirement, but he still travelled the world setting up the DESIS labs. A few years earlier Anna Meroni had co-edited Creative Communities: People Inventing Sustainable Ways of Living (2007), which collects and analyses cases of social innovation. Creative Communities conceptualizes sustainability as the ability to live well, while consuming fewer resources and generating new patterns of social cohabitation such as collective well-being. The authors framed
sustainability as a breach with pre-existing conceptions that associated well-being with material consumption. The term Creative Communities is used to indicate that social innovations usually emerge from the inventiveness and creativity of ‘ordinary people’ and their communities, sometimes in collaboration with grassroots entrepreneurs, local institutions and civic society organizations (Meroni 2007, Jègou & Manzini 2008).
Jègou and Manzini co-edited a second additional collection: Collaborative Services: Social Innovation and Design for Sustainability (2008), reporting from the same research project, but with a focus on tools, guidelines and scenarios of collaborative services, thus suggesting designers and design researchers move towards exploring a new design role engaging in social innovation.
Jègou, Manzini and their co-authors propose that designers consider themselves part of a complex mesh of designing networks: the emerging, interwoven networks of individual people, enterprises, non-profit organizations, and local and global institutions that are using creativity and entrepreneurship in order to take some concrete steps towards sustainability. The case scenario examples include self-managed services for the care of children and seniors, new forms of exchange and mutual help, community car-pooling systems, community gardens and networks linking consumers directly with food producers (Jègou & Manzini 2008).
Before travelling to Milan in 2012 I also read Anna Meroni and Daniela Sangiorgi’s book Design for Services (2011). Meroni and Sangiorgi articulate a new design discipline addressing what design is doing and can do for services. They point to a shift from service design to design for service. Where designers previously saw their tasks as conceptualisation, development and production of tangible objects, designers in the 21st century rarely design something, but rather design for something. With this shift from service design as a means of service interactions to design for service as a means for a societal change, Meroni and Sangiorgi state how designers design for change, better experiences and better services, reflecting on the transformations in the practice, role and skills of designers. The core of the new role of design for services is supporting the sense-making process of the partners, through field studies, strategic conversations, idea generation, visualizations and prototyping, as they configure the opportunities for radically new service solutions (Meroni & Sangiorgi 2011: 122). Design for services contributes to strategic design that aims to introduce major changes in local patterns, behaviours and systems (ibid: 155).
Design for services identify collaborative service models as a way of redesigning public and community services and describe a more complex (service) design that is needed in the public sector as required by the new service configurations (ibid: 119).
Living in Milan, while trying to write up my own prior co-design activities, I was also following the new roles of co-designers and researchers initiating a local community garden, Coltivando, at the university campus. One design researcher was establishing the co-housing project Via Scarsellini, while also actually living within this community, and the design research
group was creating convivial farmers markets as part of Feeding Milan. A few years after I returned from Milan to Copenhagen Ezio Manzini followed up on his previous ten years of travelling and researching with the book Design, When Everybody Designs (2015). In his latest book Manzini starts by pointing out that ‘everybody designs’ in a fast and profoundly changing world.
‘Everybody’ means not only individuals, groups, communities, companies, and associations, but also institutions, cities and entire regions. And ‘design’ means that, whether they like it or not, all these individual and collective entities are required to bring all their designing capabilities into play, to devise their life strategies and put them into practice. The result of this ‘diffuse design’ is that society as a whole can be seen as one huge laboratory in which unprecedented social forms, solutions and meanings are produced and social innovation is created. Manzini further explores and discusses what ‘expert design’ does and could do, in this world in which everybody designs and everything is designed. Here he refers to a community of professionally trained social designers who are skilled in promoting and supporting various kinds of design processes on different scales. Professional designers further contribute by making social innovations more visible and tangible to increase people’s awareness, thus making social innovations more effective and attractive to improve the experience of the people involved, further supporting the notion of replication as scaling-out and connection as scaling-up (Manzini 2015).
Ill. 1.1: Four books from the last three decades:
Andrea Branzi’s Learning from Milan: Design and the Second Modernity (1988); John Thackara’s In the Bubble:
Designing in a Complex World (2006); Anna Meroni and Daniela Sangiorgi‘s Design for Service (2011) and Ezio Manzini‘s Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation (2015).
By opening with these few highlights from design authors from my bookshelf, starting with Branzi, Thackara, Meroni and Manzini, I hope to have shown how a segment of the field of design, within the last decades, has been in transition and has moved closer towards more social, public and collaborate partnerships. As Nigel Cross pointed out as early as in 1981, we have moved from an industrial to a post-industrial society, portraying a new paradigm of design that emphasises a change towards products, processes and also the role of the designers: “Such a
paradigm would suggest a reorientation of the values, beliefs, attitudes of designers, the goals of design (i.e. the nature of design products), and the methods for achieving these goals” (Cross 1981: 5). Cross specifies how post-industrial designers play a more participatory, collaborative and anonymous role than industrial designers, and where “Industrial design matured 50 years ago”
Cross concludes “it may be another 50 years before post-industrial design reaches a similar maturity, but its seeds are now being sown” (ibid: 7).
Almost 25 years later Jamer Hunt still points to the seeds of potentiality of post- industrial design embedded in the cracks of the industrial foundation, with A Manifesto for Postindustrial Design. Hunt states: “Mass production, as we know it, will soon be extinct. So say goodbye to heavy metals, huge warehouses and durable goods. And say hello to the bearable lightness of living networks, metabolism and code” (Hunt 2005: 120). Hunt supports a disappearance of industrial design as we have known it but notes that this evolution is still breeding ‘outside industrial design’. Hunt further states that Postindustrial Design embodies the potential to create and produce differently and forecasts that designers will enable possibility, provide vision and set parameters for optimization, meaning that designers will be working with living networks, with new and unfamiliar tools in strange and unlikely places: “Evolutions and mutations are mostly breeding outside industrial design for now (…) but their seeds are implanting themselves in the cracks of the industrial foundation. And with that, new species of products will soon emerge” (ibid: 121).
Fifty years have not yet passed as predicted by Cross, before a post-industrial design practice has come of age, but design educational programs have only slowly started to change curricula to adapt to the changing demands of post-industrial designers of today. The d.School at Stanford University was founded in 20054 as a non-degree program that teaches students across the university to use design methodology and design thinking to tackle problems in their own fields. Product-Service System Design was launched the same year at Politecnico di Milano with an interdisciplinary design approach providing designers with actionable knowledge in different design fields (from product to service, from space to interaction)5. Parsons the New School for Design launched the MFA of Transdisciplinary Design in 20106 and the chairman of the program, Jamer Hunt, described the aim: “We start from the premise that there are certain challenges in the world that are too complex for an individual design discipline to address. So we wanted a place in the curriculum where we could embrace that complexity and use the design process to make a
4 https://dschool.stanford.edu/how-to-start-a-dschool/
5 http://www.pssd.polimi.it/
6 http://www.newschool.edu/parsons/mfa-transdisciplinary-design/
difference.”7 In 2014 a Co-Design Master’s program was initiated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art, School of Design (KADK), also rethinking traditional design fields, as new venues for designers are opening up and designers now engage in open collaborations with networks of non- professional designers, addressing complex societal challenges through projects with real issues and real partners.8
Many designers coming from ‘traditional’ design backgrounds have entered into these social, public and collaborative-oriented fields of design research, pointing to new formats, tools, mind-sets, frameworks and programmatic visions of new directions to where design could take a leap – from post-industrial production to new types of social production and co-creation as a means for ‘opening production’ of commons (Seravalli 2014); exploring non-anthropocentric frameworks (Jönsson 2014); patch working ‘publics-in-the-making’ (Lindström & Ståhl 2014);
making material matter in co-designing (Eriksen 2012) and applying design games as a tool, mindset and structure (Vaajakallio 2012).
Possibly some of these transitions towards ‘the social’, the public and collaborative co- production widening the scope of ‘the user’ in design process to also entail materials, non-humans and networks of (public) partners are caused by the retreat of the welfare state in Europe that has created a market for semi-public activities especially in healthcare and care for the elderly, as mentioned by Chen et al. (2016). They may also be due to the financial crises of 2008 that pushed designers and design researchers towards the public sectors and non-governmental organizations.
There may be other reasons, such as the growing body of complex societal challenges where designers wish and strive to contribute with their competencies and skills, which are impossible for me to disentangle. But one point I wish to raise is that the ‘traditional’ design disciplines are in transition, from the time I set out striving to become an industrial designer. Industrial designers of today are still very much needed, contributing to the societal challenges of tomorrow. But the tools, skills and approaches of designers in transition towards the social post-industrial design praxis have to adapt to also work more closely with the collaborative ‘social’ factors as their materiel of attention. We cannot continue to give form with the dated tools of industrial
production. We need to adjust and attune our design toolboxes to better engage in co-production.
Summing up, the field of design has indeed been in transition, designing for not only industrial production, but also co-production of services and social change. What we have seen during the last decades has been a change in the field of design and the roles of designers: From designing for users – to designing with citizens; from designing for stakeholders – to designing
7 https://www.fastcompany.com/1559917/parsons-launches-transdisciplinary-design-program-whatever
8 https://kadk.dk/en/programme/codesign
with partners; from working for clients – to working in partnerships; from working for – to working with. Design disciplines in flux must appropriate tools, approaches, and design skills, and novel designers of the future need new ways of engaging as more socially-oriented designers.
1.2 How do social design practices at design educations engage publics?
From my interest in four books, the authors and some places, we have already heard about some of the sites, materials and people that have shaped my journey and thus the backdrop defining why and how I am writing about the field of design in transition towards social and public terrains. We have heard about some of the literary works, but it is now time to turn our gaze even closer to the present people, places and practices engaging the public while
transitioning towards more social, collaborative and public-oriented design practices. I will take you to the sites where I have encountered transitions towards social design and social innovation on my journey, more specifically defining the foundation of this thesis. I want to invite you to visit some of the interesting places where ‘the new social design’ can be found and reveal some stories of what the social designers I met with and bartered amongst encounter as problems and possibilities; From ‘swamp-diving’ between Malmö and Copenhagen, to ‘touring’ through the United States, ‘rambling’ through Milano Salone and Politecnico di Milano to get a few glimpses of convivial gardening at the university campus of Bovisa at the outskirts of Milano. These three different ways of journeying and moving with or towards others also describe a wayfaring practice9 of design researchers engaging in collaborative ways of researching.
1.2.1 Swamp-diving between Malmö and Copenhagen
The first location is not a distant site. Less than an hour from Copenhagen but crossing the national boarder at Oresund, I encountered an interesting group of design researchers engaging the city of Malmö in Sweden, more specifically at Medea at Malmö University, School of Arts and Communication. Here design researchers are working with participatory design and democratization of innovation and have for the last ten years engaged the city through what they term the Malmö Living Labs (Björgvinsson et al. 2010). Explorations are carried out through an interventionist action-oriented and design practice-based approach, which entails community- based long-term engagements with different actors in the city as well as public actors such as civil servants, NGOs, companies and citizens co-designing and co-producing new practices, services
9 Ingold describes how the wayfarer is continually on the move. She is her own movement and threads her way through the world. Wayfaring is meshworked within traces of movement (Ingold 2007b & 2011).
and products.
In Making Futures (Ehn et al. 2014) design researchers from Malmö Living Labs describe how innovation and design can start within people’s everyday activities. They report from methods and processes of Malmö Living Labs’ experiments in innovation, design, and democracy, undertaken mainly by grassroots organizations, NGOs, and multi-ethnic working-class
neighbourhoods. Their approach is participatory, collaborative and engaging, with ‘users’ and
‘consumers’ acting as producers and creators, less concerned with making new objects than with making a socially sustainable future.
Pelle Ehn and his colleagues have been important figures both around Medea and in driving a development in Participatory Design (PD) from its initial focus on democracy at work towards democratizing innovation (Björgvinsson et al. 2012). Where earlier PD projects engaged within one organisation as a workplace with identifiable stakeholders as ‘workers’ and ‘management’ or
‘patients’ and ‘nurses’ all oriented towards productive activities, PD now increasingly focuses on leisure in public spheres and everyday life. Following Ehn’s challenge to participate in public controversial things (Ehn 2008) and Björgvinsson, Ehn and Hillgren’s agonistic public spaces opposing prior consensual decision-making (Björgvinsson et al 2012), design researchers have
collaboratively explored democracy and participatory innovation practices especially around the three different Living Labs i.e. ‘The Stage’ for collaborative cultural production, ‘The
Neighbourhood’ for collaborative neighbourhood practices and ‘The Factory’, a maker space for prototyping new ideas, products and services (Seravalli 2014 and Ehn et al. 2014).
Between this site of Medea in Malmö and KADK across the Sound, we were a group of PhD students who formed a group of ‘Swamp-divers’10. Collaboratively we travelled, diving into reflections of learning from our practices of co-design, also sharing new terrains of academic literature encountering for example Schön in the ‘swampy lowlands’, where messy confusing problems defy technical solution, but nevertheless involve problems of the greatest human concern (Schön 1987: 3).
1.2.2 Touring through Chicago, Seattle and New York
Within the ‘swampy lowlands’ on the Danish side of the Sound, we also organised a series of PhD seminars on Design & the Social during the spring of 2011. Here we invited peers to join our search for what ‘the social’ might be and do for design. The seminars explored
10 From Schön’s description of the ‘swampy lowlands’, where problems are messy, confusing and incapable of technical solution, but of greatest human concern, as opposed to the high, hard ground (of manageable problems) overlooking a swamp. From The Reflective Practitioner and Educating the Reflective Practitioner and Schön’s distinction between reflection-on-action and reflection-in-action (Schön 1983 & 1987)
boundaries and conjunctions between design research and different praxis-oriented approaches from the social sciences. As part of this investigation of how design and ‘the social’ might look
‘out there’, our Danish Swamp-diver fraction planned a tour: Tour-de-action11. We read, wrote and send out invitations to offer workshops, talks and dialogues with interesting people and places in America and Canada, in connection with a CHI conference that was going to take place in Vancouver, where we had written a paper: Mobilizing for Community Building and Everyday Innovation (Olander et al. 2011). It became an intense but interesting journey.
At our first stop, a corner office at the IIT Institute of Design12, I remember finding myself dumbstruck, not only searching for the right words but also searching for any good advice to come up with. My three ‘tour-de-action’ partners looked at me, since performance and thus Forum Theatre was my field. I repeated the question that had been asked, “Do you have any suggestions of how to mobilize and invite more gangsters to join the Forum Theatre picnic sessions in the park?”
The question came from a local PhD student also working with community building and mobilizing for co-design. She clarified her struggles, many not so different from the ones we had just presented and demonstrated by hosting a co-design session on mapping the everyday issues and transforming these into future puppet scenarios. Our common struggles regarding how to invite and mobilize citizens to partake in co-design workshops and events – in their case whether it was possible to decrease drive-by shootings among communities of gangsters in troubled Chicago neighbourhoods – or, in our case increasing the social well-being in communities of senior citizens in Copenhagen. We had both investigated how to explore and facilitate meaningful encounters and activities in local public parks. Even though our main ‘partners’ and contexts of gangsters and seniors were quite different, we had both discovered some interesting support within the performance literature. She described how Boal’s Forum Theatre was structuring the events and I suggested looking into how Schechner’s performance process of rehearsals supported the improvised scenarios and how props and tangible design materials had seemed to invite participation in my context.
While some American designers found it difficult to understand the interest of the welfare state of the municipality to support seniors in meeting and socializing in public parks, I occasionally found it difficult not to consider our issues of how to mobilize those potential ‘lonely seniors’ to join somewhat banal in comparison with the daily shootings and killings within their
11 The title Tour-de-action was probably inspired by the back then present call towards design activism (Julier 2011 & 2013) and the theme of the CHI workshop HCI, Politics and the City: Engaging with Urban Grassroots Movements for Reflection and Action for which we wrote the position paper: Mobilizing for Community Building and Everyday Innovation, which later turned into the article in the magazine Interactions (Olander et. al. 2011).
12 At Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago
communities partnering to invite gang-members to join the co-design process. But we both worked within our local ‘messy swamp’ of problems of ‘the greatest human concern’.
The next question to spur our dialogue came from researcher Ramia Mazé and
concerned transcendence. Based on some difficulties they had encountered in the group work at the prior workshop demonstrating co-design techniques as design games and doll scenarios, Ramia asked, “How can we invite participants to make the jump from mapping the existing landscape to the future scenario?” I remember how I had difficulty explaining the magical ‘what if’ of finding the fine balance between the accurate generic level of evocative sketches and questions without being too specific but also not too generic. Before the IIT-workshop, we had not prepared specific new content for the design game as picture cards or evocative cards introducing possible ‘what if…
questions’, but provided the same ethnographic materials from our Danish context of the DAIM project looking into everyday practices of waste sorting and recycling, as we had experienced working in many different Danish contexts. But in the American context it seemed to be too large a leap (or evoking verfremdung where we had expected familiarization) to ‘translate’ those practices into the American context. But someone commented that preparing and making the puppet scenario had helped the moment of transcendence even though the playfulness and
‘otherness’ could get a bit too far into the distant future. This is also a troublesome and interesting concern for co-designers engaging in the social perspective, how to build from what already exists and leap into future possibilities without losing touch with reality.
Ill. 1.2.2a: Workshop at IIT
Mapping the existing landscape and making future scenarios. This encounter later turned into a book contribution on Puppet Scenarios in Vijay Kumar’s 101 Design Method – A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization (Foverskov et al. in Kumar 2012: 228- 231)13
Within some of Chicago’s troubled neighbourhoods we experienced employees at different NGOs engaged within their communities to change and break with the existing ways of living, shooting and dealing drugs on the streets, into a more prosperous future. Backed by
13 And in relation to slips of ‘translation’; our manuscript suggesting “a near future; 2-5 years” turned into “near future: 25 years”
in the final version of the book.
Deborah Puntenney from Asset-Based Community Development Institute (ABCD) at
Northwestern University we met with Mary from Bethel New Life near the intersection of Lake
& Pulaski Street, who showed us the murals, exhibitions and art pieces made by local youths inside and outside the community centres. She highlighted the importance of showing and making visual the difference between this local community and other neighbourhoods, indicating that there is hope and opportunities and that it can start to grow from their local neighbourhoods as well. We later met with Alex from the Resurrection Project in the Pilsen neighbourhood who also showed us the murals displaying the local cultural identity of the Mexican community spirit and a community centre teaching senior citizens IT skills.
Ill. 1.2.2b: Bethel New Life and the Resurrection project
Mary and Alex are showing us community life in the communities of Bethel New Life and the Resurrection Project within the Pilsen and Lake & Pulaski neighbourhoods in Chicago.
Mary from Bethel New Life is showing us community life around the neighbourhood of Lake & Pulaski, with their new green rooftop, own bank, child day-care and community centre.
Alex from the Resurrection project in the Pilsen neighbourhood showing local murals, affordable housing and a senior centre
From Chicago we travelled to Seattle where we visited Jeff Hou and gave a PechaKucha presentation at Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington and visited the IDEA Space14 with community coordinator Joyce (see ill. 1.1d). IDEA Space is a resource centre
‘translating’, visualizing and making local opportunities tangible as projects of community development and urban renewal of public spaces within the international district in Seattle. IDEA Space is a venue for locals to gather and bring their ideas to life. Both Joyce from IDEA space, as well as Mary and Alex worked bottom up trying to support their community members in
14 http://idea-space.info/
translating the opportunities they have in Seattle and Chicago, for example by providing guiding material that informed about typical design and development processes and also visualizing and translating the professional architectural and design terminology into an everyday language (including Mandarin). Joyce from IDEA space worked closely with Jeff Hou and design and architecture students, focusing on community design, design activism, cross-cultural learning, and engagement of marginalized communities in planning, design and placemaking.
Ill. 1.2.2c: IDEA Space
Joyce at IDEA Space in Seattle, a resource centre for residents, business owners and stakeholders of the Seattle Chinatown International District
In New York we held a workshop at Parsons New School of Design for students and faculty at Transdisciplinary Design. We had read Jamer Hunt’s recent contribution: Prototyping the Social (2011), about speculative futures at the intersection of design and culture where “designers are increasingly adopting the tools of social observation as resources for ‘local knowledge’ that better inform and inspire the development of new ideas” (Hunt 2011: 34). We also referred to Hunt’s previous considerations on speculative ethnography with his contribution “Just Re-Do It”
to the book Strangely Familiar, about the tactical formlessness and everyday consumption at the intersection of design and everyday life (Hunt in Blauvelt ed. 2003).
After hosting the workshop Jamer Hunt asked us these apparently simple but quite complex questions: “What are you actually designing? – And how do you sense and value the outcomes?” I don’t remember our answers back then, but these questions have followed me ever since.
Cameron Tonkinwise inquired: “How do you return and deliver the results?” Tonkinwise had (back
then) recently been inviting to an exhibition15 with his shout-out: “Politics Please, We're Social Designers” (Tonkinwise 2010). He probes what happens if design-based social innovation is not just a way of avoiding conventional, explicit politics but a way of undermining politics stating that:
being ethical, in order to avoid politics is a political position too, so how to return and deliver results is also a matter of whom do we return and deliver results to.
Transdisciplinary Design students presented their projects working with the troubled neighbourhood of Hunts Point in the South Bronx. Through the design students’ work we experienced different snippets of everyday life around the ‘bodegas’, food distribution systems and how specific communities on the streets perform their everyday culture, reenacted by a student with a background in dance and performance.
After visiting and engaging in dialogues in Chicago, Vancouver, Seattle and then New York, I started to realise how unique, though troublesome, our close collaboration with the Municipality of Copenhagen and private companies was for my thesis project set-up. At our first visit in Chicago at the ABCD institute, showcasing their booklets, we turned down the offer to receive a copy of their booklet on how to collaborate with faith-based organizations, as we found it less relevant to our context. The researcher looked intensely at us and said that was also how she started out, but there was no way around not collaborating with church- or faith-based assets.
This is simply the best way to connect to local communities in the Chicago neighbourhoods and apparently throughout the States, according to her and the ABCD approach. Maybe I should have made a similar ‘translation booklet’ describing a guide of the Danish context and how to best collaborate with the transition of the welfare state and civic servants within municipally-based organizations, since this seemed as exotic for US designers as when we Danes visited the different local communities and their peers within faith-based organizations. But let’s leap from diving across local cultural differences to a larger collection of international contemporary design.
1.2.3 Rambling through the Salone Satellites at the fringes of Milano
I travelled to Milan in the spring of 2012. The great design week, Salone del Mobile16, which attracts designers and design students from all over the world, had just opened when I arrived. Buzzling places filled with people. Not only Manzini’s local ‘everyday people’ but mainly foreign designers and some locals meeting and greeting at sites carefully set and staged for designers to reclaim production sites. Old empty factory halls, where production of heavy goods had once taken place, were now filled with small lightweight 3D printers printing everything from
15 The Parsons DESIS Lab's project Amplifying Creative Communities
16 Salone del Mobile di Milano is one of the greatest design fairs in Europe (some even say the world) taking place once a year in spring. The Salone Satellites are exhibition events at multiple sites around the city by contemporary and explorative designers.
food to chocolate guns and solid chairs.
Also, within Milano’s historic palazzos, designers were taking back the means of production with tactics of making, hacking, and mobile manufacturing. With the new tools such as cheap 3D printers and laser cutters in the hands of designers and not the big manufacturers, the design displayed was not (only) the objects, but rather the processes, strategies and tactics behind it. At the Science and Tech Museum people were queuing to self-produce and assemble
‘their own’ laser cut Tom Dixon chair. At Palazzo Clerici one could follow The Future in The Making as Autoprogettazione 2.0 filled courtyards, great dining halls and cellars, paying homage to the visionary concept of autoprogettazione, proposed in 1974 by the Milanese designer Enzo Mari.
Mari's renowned concept roughly translates as ‘self-designed’ and consists of a set of guidelines to create cheap, high-quality, long-lasting and easy-to-assemble furniture by using only rough boards and nails. The end-product, although usable, is mainly important because of its educational value. Autoprogettazione 2.0 invited designers to consider the potential of a diffused and localised manufacturing network for the future of design, combined with the self-designed, self-built and self-produced concept proposed by Mari, a call to action that combined both the design communities and collaborative, open-source networks of production.
The design objects such as printed chairs and sintered bowls to be found here were not the main design on display. On display were almost staged performances of designers, for example Dirk Vander Kooij, who were feeding and demonstrating the true design objects on display such as the Endless Robot: a 3D printer that the designer had designed and built (see 1.2.3a).
The robot was now gracefully performing at the stage attracting audience attention with its energetic presence, transforming the colourful plastic granulates of recycled fridges into solid chairs. The printed chairs on display behind the printing robot were merely backdrops for staging the process of production. Another example was Markus Kayser’s proposal for a Solar Sinter as a simple CNC machine capable of constructing objects with solar power and the use of sand as a raw material, sintering rough glass pieces in the desert.
Ill. 1.2.3a: The Future in The Making
Milano Salone 2012 at Palazzo Clerici ‘The Future in The Making’: Endless Robot, Solar Sinter and a temporary Fab Lab and maker space (Pictures by ‘The Future in The Making’)
The conceptual Dutch design company Droog staged a Future Furniture Fair under the title Material Matters. The exhibition raised awareness of the turmoil of our economic system where resources are becoming scarce, yet we still stick to the same economic models, producing more products – thus producing more waste. Droog invited 20 design companies, some imaginary, others real, to suggest alternative economic models asking such questions as: What if income tax were to be replaced with tax on raw materials? What would this mean for the design industry? Will designers then offer alternative ways of creating materials or specialize in upcycling or concentrate on services?
Not only high-profile international designers attended the Salone. There were 202 local Melanesian designers and craftspeople who exhibited at the Cattedrale della Fabbrica del Vapore under the manifesto Milano si autoproduce: Milano self-produced design17. The self-produced design also carried the rough prototyped and self-fabricated aesthetics with a sketchy finish. Only curated by the alphabetic order of the designers names a more than multi-coloured vibrant diversity materialized and manifested itself, when the many designers ‘introduced themselves’ and exhibited in the same hall, all promoting self-produced design and small-scale production.
The Danish artist collective Bureau Detours, exhibited under the alias Dennis Design Center (as a pun on the Danish Design Center, a knowledge centre for Danish design, but now with a human name), collaborated with Melanesian artists and had built a pop-up gas service station in wood with workshop facilities on the parking lot right outside one of the main exhibition spaces. With slogans on posters such as “a new design every day” and “open source design” they produced simple and site-specific furniture made of pallets appropriating city life for example the social ladder, the bench press, the sunshine lounger, the sidewalk chair and the bulldog chair as chairs to carry along, ladders to climb fences, benches to watch crowds or overcome the large pools of rainwater under this year’s Salone. Bureau Detours and Italian colleagues raised and staged a debate about how design and the use of public space are generated and communicated with a performance performing ‘work in progress’ by temporarily settling and dwelling in urban spaces and producing street furniture.
17 http://www.misiad.it/
http://www.misiad.it/Images/202-autori-si-autoproducono.pdf http://www.misiad.it/Images/202autori_2012.pdf
Ill. 1.2.3b: Milano si autoproduce design & Dennis Design Centre
In the old Steam Factory (built for construction, repair and sale of railway and streetcar materials) the exhibition Milano si autoproduce design was displayed. Below Bureau Detours and local Italian artists are in front of the co- constructed gas service station in wood under the heading Dennis Design Centre producing “a new design every day”
Left: The manifesto of Milano si autoproduce design by Alessandro Mendini (Misiad 2012: 4). Right: The Cattedrale della Fabbrica del Vapore with markings for the 202 local designers before and during the opening of the Salone (Misiad 2012: 2 & 57) (Illustration and pictures by Mendini and Misiad)
Dennis Design Centre by Danish Bureau Detours and local Italian artists (Picture by Bureau Detours)
